It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism